I purchased the Android BackCountry Navigator app for my phone, but now I need to load up a map file for the sierra. How do I do that? Please don't use any geek speak or skip any steps. I'm a crusty old dude and need some hand holding on tech issues.

This is probably of no use to you as I dont do the gps thing, but I do download USGS topos in a PDF format into my phone and use them. I also have peaks passes trails in my phone that I use almost every trip.

GPS just takes up way too much battery to be of any use to me. I could see using it on a day hike I guess but that is about it.

I've been using Backcountry Navigator for about a year now, and I'll admit that it was a steep learning curve. Downloading the maps requires you to manually draw squares around the areas that you want (annoying), but when you think about it, there's really no better way to do it. Apparently there's some way to select the area on your computer and then download that to your phone, but I'm not tech savvy enough to figure that out. Here's a video that I found helpful when trying to figure out how to use BCN:

But now that I've figured out how to use it, I love it! If put my phone in airplane mode, and only use BCN when I want to check my position (rather than to record a track of my entire hike), I find that my phone battery will easily last me 2-3 days.